GRANVILLE, Ohio (AP) — The Ohio State Highway Patrol says its troopers have written fewer tickets on some stretches of highway where the speed limit was bumped to 70 mph earlier this year.

The patrol says it issued about 19,000 speeding tickets in July, August and September on the 12 sections of rural interstate where the speed limit was increased on July 1. That's fewer than troopers wrote during the same period in the past two years, The Columbus Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1eYUIeB ) reports.

However, compared with the five-year average from 2008 to 2012 during those months, troopers wrote about 500 more tickets this year.

Officials say three months of data are too small a sample to draw any hard conclusions.